Crypto Fiction

Crypto novels are not that common. It's an esoteric
subject that remains too small to even justify a niche title.
Most of the treatments relate to only fringe interests.

There is a bit of a revival in crypto interest within the
90's science fiction genre. This can be traced back to
authors who are influenced by the net, and geographically,
it's clear that the main stars in this revival hail from
or are influenced by the bay area and the cypherpunks movement.

For what it's worth, and to generate some commissions for
Cryptix,
I list here some crypto novels I've read. I rate them
with bits of entropy, as a sort of reverse correlation
with relevance. This rating isn't necessarily a view
that this book is good or bad, just that it has a valued
combination of readability and cryptology.

If you're looking for a present for that pesky relative that keeps
asking "so, what is it that you do?" then you may find the
answer below.

Cryptonomicon

The leading light in the crypto novel scene has to be
Cryptonomicon.
This book, the fourth by trail blazing net author
Neal Stephenson, is recent, having been published in mid 1999,
and remains the only
financial cryptography
novel I have come across.

Cryptonomicon is an achievment, with a deserved 5 random bits
of entropy, and it will become the novel against which
all others are compared.

In brief, Randy Waterhouse and his startup companions
embark on laying fibre around the Phillipines. Whilst
building, new opportunities arise, chief of which is
the combination of a local Sultan who wishes to build
a data haven, and a rumour of a mountain of lost gold.

What lifts this book out of the ordinary, and indeed,
camoflages the fairly simple plot, is the
two intertwined threads separated by two generations.
Randy's grandfather and a WWII team of crypto scientists
work on dampening the Axis' ability to detect the Enigma cracks,
coincidentally laying foundations for Randy's attempts to historically decrypt
his forbears' trail. This historical story is fascinating,
it takes the Enigma story well beyond what has been covered
elsewhere.

The crypto content is superb. Mathematical basies, Turing
and his bicycle, entropy, ciphers,
are all woven into the story
in a fashion that anyone with high school mathematics
could understand.

Cryptonomicon has a deeper underlying significance that
most will have written off as plot. Along the chase,
Randy and his mates discover the opportunity of setting
up a private currency, nominally based on the alleged
gold. In crisis-ravaged Asia, where currencies fell as
systemic failure swept through the banking system, gold-
backed currencies, issued over the net, and cryptographically
protected from all attackers, is the perfect entrepot for
the issuance of private money.

Recall that private currencies disappeared about a century
ago, as the newfangled Central Bank idea, born out of Britain,
swept the civilised world to mark the 20th century as one of
government money and government inflation. For various
reasons which we'll gloss over here - read the book - the
time of private currencies has come again.

But it was not in the prediction of a new financial
world that the subtelty of Stephenson's research,
and indeed unnamed advisors, shows. It is in the fact that
the model he presents for a gold-backed currency is state
of the art, in an art that was forgotten a hundred years ago,
and indeed was only poorly understood then.

Readers could even be forgiven for accusing the art to be
stateless, if it wasn't for the existance of at least one
tiny Internet private currency, backed by gold. It was
these guys, the e-gold private currency,
who airshipped me a copy to read and respond. But there
is no response possible, as Stephenson got it right.
Prospective private currency issuers now have a novel that
will save them from countless mistakes, and I now have an
answer to that question, "so, what is it that you're doing
that takes you so far from home?"

Digital Fortress

The NSA is the world's biggest employer of mathematicians,
and as they are mostly employed on cryptology (the combined
art of cracking codes and making codes) it is a great setting
for a crypto novel.

Dan Brown first published
Digital Fortress,
back in 1998 or so, as the crypto wars were in full swing on
the net. Netizens may recall the subtle coup de grace
signed by outgoing President Clinton when he released
out free and open source crypto from the clutches of the US government.
That tiny window of opportunity both released all the Americans
to join the crypto revolution, and crushed the rebellious spirit
of cryptoplumbers everywhere.

The NSA once again proved it could see strategically far into
the future, and Digital Fortress is about that world. Brown
postulates that the NSA can crack all our codes with a massive
but secret machine, until an
ex-employee taunts them with an uncrackable algorithm.
Confusion, misinformation, insiders fighting against
each other, the book does a good job of representing an
organisation so secret its hands can't count each other.

The crypto content is neither high nor accurate
but the organisational picture
is good for someone who knows little of this world.
Even though it is written for a younger non-technical audience
I rate it as 3 bits of entropy.
Cryptoplumbers and geeks will be frustrated, and probably will
enjoy his next novel more as the content is less likely
to be as familiar: Angels and Demons.
His later novel, the highly popular The Da Vinci Code
does include some basic crypto content but I haven't read it as yet.

Enigma

In all the fictional writings of cryptology,
the Enigma machine takes pride of place.
Enigma,
is no different, but touches little on the machine itself.

Robert Harris, author of
Fatherland,
presents a story of spies and intrigue
set amongst the paranoic secrecy of Bletchley Park.
Like Cryptonomicon, the historical protagonist is
a mathematician at the core of the code breaking
effort.

This story is cryptologically valuable for its description of Bletchley
Park, even to the workflow and passage of the information
through the now quaint series of human I/O devices, computers,
and analysts.

As a novel, it is well written and entirely readable,
falling within the class of WWII / spies / detectives,
and I rate it with 3 bits of entropy.

The Last Lieutenant

Corregidor features yet again in this novel about
the collapse of the island fortress and the plight
of the last remaining coding officer.

Showing more of the Allies side,
The Last Lieutenant,
portrays a story of espionage against the communications
infrastructure of the Americans in the Pacific.
A lot of background, a lot of machinery, and an inside view
of the messages sent. Little actual cryptography, but worth
some 3 bits of entropy.

If you like daring war stories, this one has it all!

A Fire Upon The Deep

I think Vernor Vinge would have to be my favourite
science fiction author, just pipping out Stephenson.
A Fire Upon The Deep
is a tour de force of 90's science fiction.

It actually has very little crypto in it, so it is hard for
me to award it more than 3 bits of entropy. The main players
ship out of a port with a third part of a one time pad. The
other two parts ship via other means - a security precaution.

The one time slice never makes it to its destination, but
is used later in a last ditch effort to establish comms with
the good guys, whilst being chased by the bad guys across
the universe.

This is not a funny book, but Vinge's humour comes through
with a single crypto joke which still makes me laugh.
To enjoy the joke, you'll have to buy the book.

An Instance of the Fingerpost

Fingerpost is by far the most serious novel
I have read in decades. It is the sort of story
that one avidly devours as a teenager, searching
pages
for the most challenging answers to life, maturity
and everything.
An Instance of the Fingerpost
is a huge historic novel sliced into 4 books, each
by different writers handing the story from one to
the next.

It is a mystery, developed through the eyes of each
successive writer, within the turbulent years of
the Restoration, 1663 in Oxford.

A lot of the subplot turns around some encrypted
letters that allege to reveal the truth behind
the mystery. They've ended up in the care of the
government's chief cryptographer, the third story
teller. Before we get to his story, we have the
tales of a medic and a young man-about-town, the
adventure of the first blood transfusion, a
scurrilous plot to blacken the name of a gentleman,
and the inevitable mysterious damsel in distress.

This is a long, complex book. It's also not light
entertainment, or, at least it such that it took
me many months to make my way through it.
If you are looking
for serious historical context, this may work for you.
And, the cryptography is interesting for its period
and context, but the description of early ciphers
only rates 2 bits of entropy.

The Enigma

This book is about the machine,
and therefore deserves its title.

Written by Michael Barak,
The Enigma
is the story of a con man who is offered a 'dirty dozen'
deal: go to Europe and steal an Enigma, and all charges
will be dropped.

It's actually quite readable as a story, but the crypto component is
low to non-existant, unless you like reading descriptions
of how the Enigma was constructed. For its irrelevance to the
search at hand, it only gets one bit of entropy, but read it
nonetheless if you come across it (quite difficult as its out
of print, I found my copy at Roy's book club).

Miscellaneous

To read

The Code Book

Simon Singh's
The Code Book
is a very readable account of the development of cryptography
over the ages. It seems to skate over much material, but Singh
shows an ability to pick out the salient events in history, and
open them up.

Here is an extract entitled
The Arab Cryptanalysts.
Curiously this story mirrors the evolution of
financial cryptography:
only after a significant array of other disciplines were brought
to bear by the enlightened scholars of the Islamic world,
for a wide range of motives and interests, was the invention of
frequency analysis discovered and applied to cryptograms.
Thus, the monoalphabetic cipher fell, and cryptanalysis was born.

Unsolved and Solved Ciphers

Elonka maintains a list of
well-known unsolved codes and ciphers.
A couple of the better-known unsolved
ancient historical scripts are also thrown in,
since they tend to come up during any
discussion of unsolved codes.